Emil Johansson is the brains behind LOTR Project. His site, you may recall, brought us the Middle-earth family tree.

Now he's unveiled an extension to the project that collates population statistics from extant Middle-earth resources, and explores various age and life-expectancy trends. Johansson describes it as an exploration of the world of Tolkien through numbers.

Johansson told TheOneRing.net that the most time-consuming part was entering the information on 923 different characters into the database -- their age at death, gender, and race.

"The most interesting thing is perhaps the graph of the decline of the longevity of Men," he said.

"There is a clear pattern. What surprised me the most was how long Aragorn lived compared to many of his ancestors. After reading up on Aragorn's death I learned he was the first Numenorean in a long time who was given the grace to go at his own will."

He said that he has plans for a collaborative project where people can interact freely with a Middle-Earth map much like Google maps.

"Further integration of a map feature will allow me to tie each character to one or more locations," he said.

"Much of the beauty of this project is I do not know what I will do next. Things just happen."